Page 220 - Quantitative Data Analysis

Quantitative Data Analysis
Simply Explained Using SPSS

ACS was administered, however this analysis focused only on the 18
items from the proposed short form of the ACS (Frydenberg& Lewis,
1993).

Procedure
Participants completed a modified short version of the ACS towards
the end of their 9 day Outward Bound program. The instrument was
administered by the group instructors, along with a measure of self-
concept and psychological well being, as part of a larger study. A
standard protocol for the administering was used (see Appendix A –
not included in this example).

Results

Data Screening
The data was screened for univariate outliers. Three out-of-range
values, due to administrative errors, were identified and recoded as
missing data. The minimum amount of data for factor analysis was
satisfied, with a final sample size of 218 (using listwise deletion),
with over 12 cases per variable.

Factor Analysis
Initially, the factorability of the 18 ACS items was examined. Several
well-recognized criteria for the factorability of a correlation were
used. Firstly, 16 of the 18 items correlated at least .3 with at least
one other item, suggesting reasonable factorability. Secondly, the
Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .73, above
the recommended value of .6, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was
2
significant ( (153) = 840.26, p < .05). The diagonals of the anti-
image correlation matrix were all over .5, supporting the inclusion
of each item in the factor analysis. Finally, the communalities were
all above .3 (see Table 1), further confirming that each item shared

The Theory and Applications of Statistical Inferences 204